Natascha Elena Uhlmann - Abolish ICE

Table of Contents

The views expressed in this book do not necessarily reflect the views of the New Sanctuary Coalition.

2019 Natascha Elena Uhlmann

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paperback ISBN 978-1-949017-21-2 ebook ISBN 978-1-949017-22-9

To my mother, and the New Sanctuary Coalition

La lucha sigue

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

T his book is about abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But it is also about much more than that.

This book is about the women who clean your house. And watch your kids. And do so much of the invisible labor that makes the world we live in possible.

This book is about violence, and about cruelty. It is about fifteen-year-old girls who are propositioned by grown men, and ninety-year-old men who leave everything theyve ever known behind. It is about being a stranger in your own home.

It is also about building anew.

I n July 2018, the news broke of seventy people who had been summoned to appear in court for deportation proceedings. Why was this newsworthy? All of them were less than one year old.

Though migration is at historically low levels, in 2018 the United States initiated more deportation proceedings against children than in any other year for which data is available.

Contrary to the requirements of our criminal legal system, immigrants in deportation proceedings are not entitled to an appointed lawyer. They are instead given a list of legal aid attorneys to contact that might be able to help. Predictably, demand for these services far outpaces supply, and many are turned away. The stakes are high: more than 80 percent of children who represent themselves in court are deported, only 12 percent of those with legal representation are. Only one-fourth of unaccompanied children in deportation proceedings secure a lawyer.

The US government has fought relentlessly against providing kids in immigration proceedings with lawyers. They claim theyre not needed. In 2016, Assistant Chief Immigration Judge Jack H. Weil famously argued: Ive taught immigration law literally to 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds. He continues: It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of patience. They get it. Its not the most efficient, but it can be done.

Key developmental milestones for three-year-olds include knowing their first name and using two to three sentences at a time. Many cant speak at all.

Perhaps the greatest value of history is that it reveals to us how contingent so much of the world really is. Institutions that seem unyielding and hierarchies that seem immutable reveal themselves to be the products of chance or ideology. Although ICE, the US agency that enforces our immigration laws, may seem like an immovable fixture of the American state, it is very likely that you yourself are older than the agency. Created in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the formation of ICE was made possible only in a culture of fear and xenophobia and through bipartisan support for the idea that immigrants are inherently more predisposed to violence. For the vast majority of US history, weve gotten along just fine without the agency, although notit must be saidwithout pervasive and gratuitous cruelty toward immigrants by other means.

To understand ICE and the environment in which it operates, we must understand what came before. We wont be able to comprehend the US immigration systemone that sees sexual violence as a tool at its disposal, that locks away children in cages, and that forces three-year-olds to represent themselves in courtwithout looking at the history of US meddling in global affairs. Understanding US intervention around the world helps us recognize the horrific fate that could force parents to run the risk of having their children caught up in the immigration system.

This chapter traces a history (one among many) of US intervention in Latin America. The full scope of US terror could fill several books, however. It is my hope that you will take this chapter as a mere jumping-off point for exploring the instability the United States has fostered across the globe through military aggression and economic coercion alike. There is power in knowing our history. US complicity in the migrant crisis it now bemoans is all too conveniently swept aside. We cannot allow a nation so steeped in the violence of the migrant crisis to set the terms of the debate.

A great many academics have written important treatises on the politics of immigration. But a popular immigrant slogan perhaps says it best: We are here because you were there.

Americas very roots are steeped in bloodshed and dispossession. From 1776 to the present day, the United States seized over 1.5 billion acres of Native land. Whether through fraud, deception, or outright murder, the colonizers were merciless in their greed. Californias first governor, Peter Burnett, famously declared: That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the two races until the Indian race becomes extinct, must be expected. American violence is as old as America itself.

Slavery, too, made it possible for the United States to accumulate the resources necessary to pursue an imperialist policy in the Americas and beyond. Often portrayed as an institution benefiting only a wealthy elite, slavery was in fact central to white Americas prosperity. As Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, In the seven cotton states, one-third of all white income was derived from slavery. By 1840, cotton produced by slave labor constituted 59 percent of the countrys exports.

Through death and dispossession, the United States rose to global dominance. These ill-gotten gains at home allowed America to fund its violent interventions abroad.

Guatemala, 1953. The United Fruit Companyyou may know them as Chiquita Bananasis uneasy. Guatemalas president, Jacobo rbenz is implementing broad reforms benefiting Guatemalas poor. Among the reforms is an expanded right to vote, the right for workers to unionize, and, most worryingly from United Fruits perspective, an agrarian reform law that would grant Guatemalas poverty-stricken farmers small plots of unused land. Agrarian reform was desperately needed; at the time the reforms were enacted, just 2 percent of the population controlled 72 percent of Guatemalas arable land.

Decree 900, as it was known, redistributed massive unused land holdings to Guatemalas poorest inhabitants, typically indigenous groups that had been sentenced to poverty and exclusion since the days of conquest. Though landowners were duly compensated for the expropriation of their untilled land, the mere prospect of redistribution sent Guatemalas wealthy elite into a moral panic. As thousands of poverty-stricken Guatemalans starved, the elite proclaimed that the reforms would destroy Guatemalas economy. As the United Fruit Company wiped out forests across the continent, they declared that the reforms would have grave environmental consequences. Their fear-mongering failed to resonate with those systematically excluded from Guatemalas bounty.